WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #38-24: By Ramy, Corvetto and all of us (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Ramy Elgaml, a 19-year-old boy living in the Corvetto neighborhood, dies

during the night between November 23 and 24, chased by a police car
through the streets of Milan for over eight kilometers. Friends and
relatives immediately pour into the streets, demanding "truth and
justice", as they write on the banners that are still hanging today
between Via dei Cinquecento and Via Panigarola. The investigation is
strangely entrusted to the Carabinieri, rather than to the Local Police,
as is customary. On Monday afternoon, three police vans appear in Piazza
Gabrio Rosa, buses are diverted and during the evening a third protest
breaks out in the streets of the neighborhood, the first of direct
clashes with the police that continue until almost midnight, with
charges, barricades, tear gas, ending with an arrest. Have you heard
this story yet? It is the same as that of Davide Bifolco (16 years old)
and Ugo Russo (15 years old) in Naples, or of Nahel Merzouk (17 years
old) in Nanterre in France, along with that of many others.

Stories like Ramy's are not exceptional, neither in Corvetto nor in
other popular neighborhoods of Milan and its hinterland: the dynamics of
general impoverishment caused by the processes of speculative
subtraction, brought about by the now very rapid urban transformation,
increasingly fragment the social and urban fabric, isolating
increasingly large pockets of the population deprived of everything in
contexts defined as "marginal". In these "islands", if they are not
included in the plans of "showcase suburbs" on which to implement
actions and calls for "community welfare" (read: privatization of social
services), the only answers are the so-called "urban regeneration" to
push the lower-income population to leave; and a de facto police state
that mainly affects categories considered dangerous: among these, young
people and very young people who suffer discrimination and daily
violence, if they have the wrong skin color, if they live in public
housing, if they carry a purse or if they listen to trap music. And the
usual repressive responses are fueled by toxic media narratives that
play on fear and the demand for order to justify security interventions,
resorting to the usual stereotypes of drug dealing and degradation.

Ramy has suffered all this. The Corvetto neighborhood has suffered all
this exactly 10 years since November 2014 when, under the Pisapia
administration, a season of housing evictions began in view of Expo 2015
or what is now called "redevelopment" of the neighborhoods. The
south-eastern suburbs of Milan have seen a further acceleration, in
particular since 2019 with the assignment to Italy of the 2026 Winter
Olympic Games, which will have one of the centers of the great event in
Milan. These are, in fact, the places that will host the local
infrastructure of the Olympics: the Olympic Village in the former Porta
Romana railway station (destined to become a new private and luxury
student residence once the event is over) and the Pala Italia in Santa
Giulia (a new ice stadium built in the same city that almost two years
ago closed the historic Agorà facility in the Giambellino neighborhood).
But it is not only the Olympic construction sites that threaten the
neighborhoods with their transformations: at the gates of the popular
Corvetto, Symbiosis is being built, a 130,000 square meter luxury and
business district that will host the central headquarters of Fastweb,
SNAM, Louis Vuitton and other large companies; the student housing
affair also unfolds with the construction of the Aparto Milan Ripamonti
in the former Consorzio Agrario by Hines, a few meters from the
Residenza Isonzo of Bocconi, while the so-called "Bosco della Musica" in
Rogoredo will be added to the student housing of the Polytechnic in the
proletarian Piazza Ferrara. Then there are the operations of subtraction
of the public and popular housing fabric: we refer to the sale of the
former ENPAM buildings in via Sulmona to the US fund Apollo, which has
entrusted the SGR Investire with the plan to sell the apartments
historically inhabited by working-class tenants, and to the project to
demolish the so-called "minimum homes" ALER in via Barzoni, which should
be rebuilt by increasing the volumes and allocating a portion of them to
sale.

All this has caused the - only apparently - paradoxical effect of having
made one of the neighborhoods with the lowest income in the city and the
highest unemployment and joblessness rates the area where real estate
sales and rental values have recorded the highest increase in the entire
metropolitan area. The reaction to Ramy's death is the result of an
accumulation of anger for years of discrimination and violence suffered
especially by the youngest population of Corvetto, by the police and
institutional policies that, consistently with the logic of the "Milan
model", interpret the territories solely as goods from which to extract
as much value as possible for the market, reducing social services,
public places of social and youth aggregation, closing cultural spaces
and food redistribution (such as the historic neighborhood markets). We
cannot say whether Corvetto is more like a "banlieue" or a "ghetto" and
we honestly believe that it matters little. What matters is to recognize
the dynamics of expulsion and ferocious inequality that the government
of Milan is producing and to understand together with the inhabitants
how to organize at the community level forms of life, sociality and
resistance to police and institutional hostility that bring the right
anger from instinct to politics.

One of the results of the protests of the last few days has been, in
addition to the media attention on the case, the registration of the
carabiniere in the register of suspects. What we can hope for is that
the mobilization continues until it turns into a real revolt - not only
in Corvetto.

Off Topic political laboratory

Corvetto, rights, inequality, gentrification, Milan, suburbs, Ramy
Elgaml, racism, repression, real estate speculation

https://umanitanova.org/di-ramy-corvetto-e-tutt-noi/
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